Congress
is poised to approve new legislation that amounts to the first substantive
expansion of the controversial USA Patriot Act since it was approved just
after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Acting at the Bush
administration's behest, a joint House-Senate conference committee has
approved a provision in the 2004 Intelligence Authorization bill that will
permit the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to demand records from a
number of businesses – without the approval of a judge or grand jury – if it
deems them relevant to a counter-terrorism investigation.

The measure would extend
the FBI's power to seize records from banks and credit unions to securities
dealers, currency exchanges, travel agencies, car dealers, post offices,
casinos, pawnbrokers and any other business that, according to the
government, has a "high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory
matters." Such seizures could be carried out with the approval of the
judicial branch of government.

Until now only banks,
credit unions, and similar financial institutions were obliged to turn over
such records on the FBI's demand.

Shortly after the
conference agreement was reached, the House of Representatives approved the
underlying authorization bill by a margin of 263 to 163. The measure is
expected to pass the Senate shortly.

The American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) said it was "disappointed" with the House's approval,
but also expressed satisfaction that a number of lawmakers on both left and
right decided to oppose the bill because they oppose the records provision,
whose inclusion in the bill was discovered by staff aides only last week.

Particularly notable in
Thursday's House vote was the defection by several conservative Republicans
from the administration's fold.

"This PATRIOT Act expansion
was the only controversial part of this legislation, and it prompted more
than a third of the House, including 15 conservative Republicans, to change
what is normally a cakewalk vote into something truly contested," said
Timothy Edgar, ACLU Legislative Counsel.

"One need look no further
than this vote to get an effective gauge of the PATRIOT Act's lack of
popularity on Capitol Hill and among the American people," he said.

The USA PATRIOT Act – which
gives unprecedented powers to the FBI and the federal government as a whole
and was rammed through Congress at the administration's behest just six
weeks after the 9/11 attacks – has evoked great controversy.

An unusual coalition of
liberal, left, and right-wing groups is convinced that the law's expansion
of the government's surveillance and investigatory powers threatens
individual freedoms and privacy rights.

More than 200 local
governments, including some of the country's largest cities, have approved
resolutions upholding the full enjoyment of the rights guaranteed in the
Constitution and urging a narrowing of the USA PATRIOT Act, while the Senate
Judiciary Committee has been holding a series of critical hearings over the
past month about the Act's impact.

Members of the Judiciary
Committee, including Republican Larry Craig of Idaho and five Democratic
senators, sent a letter to the conference committee earlier this week urging
it strip the new provision from the intelligence bill so that it could be
taken up by their Committee in public hearings. The provision has never been
publicly debated.

"I'm concerned about this,"
Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, who tried unsuccessfully to limit the life of
the new provision, told the New York Times. "The idea of expanding the
powers of government gives everyone pause except the Republican leadership."

The government wants these
powers in order to more effectively prosecute the "war on terrorism,"
although critics warn that, once given these powers, the FBI may use them in
cases that are not relevant to terrorism in order to gather evidence against
other targets of investigation.

Indeed, recent Senate
hearings have covered incidents in which information about individuals was
obtained by the FBI through the use of its counter-terrorism powers even
though the investigations were directed against what the ACLU called
"garden-variety criminals."

The provision not only
permits the FBI to seize records from more kinds of businesses; it also
forbids businesses from informing their clients about the seizures.

In that respect, it is
comparable to a particularly controversial section of the PATRIOT Act
permitting the FBI to seek an order for library records for an
"investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine
intelligence activities" and imposing a gag order on librarians, who are
prohibited from telling anyone that the FBI demanded the records. Librarians
and civil-liberties groups have sued the government to have that section
declared unconstitutional.

"The more checks and
balances against government abuse are eroded, the greater that abuse," said
the ACLU's Edgar. "We're going to regret these initiatives down the road."

Jim Lobe
is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at
www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. He can
be reached at:
jlobe@starpower.net